http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1454850,00.html
Comment
Not in my name
How dare Tony Blair genuflect on our behalf before the
corpse of a man whose edicts killed millions?
Polly Toynbee
Friday April 8, 2005
The Guardian
With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding,
unreason is in full flood this week. Yet again,
rationalists who thought they understood this secular,
sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from
Rome.
The BBC airwaves have disgraced themselves. The Mail
went mad with its front-page headlines, "Safe in
Heaven" and the next day "Amen". Even this august
organ, which sprang from the loins of nonconformist
dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres
of Pope reverencing. Poor old Prince Rainier of that
squalid little tax haven missed his full Hello! death
rites through bad timing.
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The arcane flummery brings forth dusty academics in
Vaticanology, the Act of Settlement and laws of
Monegasque succession. These pantomimes of power
fascinate in their quaintness, but they signify
nothing beyond momentary frisson.
The millions pouring into Rome (pray there is no
Mecca-style disaster) herald no resurgence of
Catholicism. The devout are there, but this is
essentially a Diana moment, a Queen Mother's
catafalque. People queue to join great public
spectacles, hoping it's a tell-my-grandchildren event.
Communing with public emotion is easy now travel is
cheap. These things are driven by rolling, unctuous
television telling people a great event is unfolding,
focusing on the few hysterics in tears and not the
many who come to feel their pain.
Bill Clinton had it right yesterday: "The man knows
how to build a crowd." Curiously, the celebrity nature
of this event - a must-do for 200 world leaders -
signifies the opposite of what it seems. It shows how
far people have forgotten what the church really is,
how profoundly ignorant and indifferent they have
become to history and theology. Hell, he was just a
good ol' boy, wore white, blessed folk, prayed for
peace - why not?
In Europe church attendance is plummeting, even in
Poland, the heart of reactionary Catholicism. Here the
young are clueless about the most basic Christian
stories. How about the DJ who opened his show with
"Happy Good Friday!" Art galleries now need to explain
the agony in the garden, the raising of Lazarus and
even the annunciation. In surveys, half the population
couldn't say what Easter meant. It is precisely this
insouciant ignorance that lets people emote with the
flow; they know not what they do.
The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists
collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories
in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force
for cruelty and hypocrisy. It has weak temporal power,
so George Bush can safely pray at the corpse of the
man who criticised the Iraq war and capital
punishment; it simply didn't matter as the Pope never
made a serious issue of it or ordered the US church to
take strong action.
The Vatican's deeper power is in its personal
authority over 1.3 billion worshippers, which is
strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees.
With its ban on condoms the church has caused the
death of millions of Catholics and others in areas
dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and
right across the world. In countries where 50% are
infected, millions of very young Aids orphans are
today's immediate victims of the curia. Refusing
support to all who offer condoms, spreading the lie
that the Aids virus passes easily through microscopic
holes in condoms - this irresponsibility is beyond all
comprehension.
This is said often, even in this unctuous week - and
yet still it does not permeate. He was a good, caring
man nevertheless, they say, as if it were a minor
aberration. But genuflecting before this corpse is
scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both
put extreme ideology before human life and happiness,
at unimaginable human cost. How dare our prime
minister go there in our name to give the Vatican our
approval for this? Will he think of Africa when on his
knees today? I trust history will some day express
astonishment at moral outrage wasted on sexual trivia
while papal celebrity and charisma cloaked this great
Vatican crime.
The editor of the Catholic Herald was somewhat
Jesuitical when I argued with him in a BBC studio
yesterday. He asked how the Pope could be blamed when
all the church calls for is sex within marriage and
abstinence. But abstinence and celibacy are not the
human condition. If the Vatican learned anything about
humanity, it would humbly meditate on 4,450 Catholic
clergy in the US alone accused of molesting children
since 1950, and no doubt as many in Catholic churches
elsewhere still in denial.
The scale of it is breathtaking yet not at all
surprising: most humans are sexual beings. A Vatican
edict in the 1960s threatened to excommunicate anyone
breaking secrecy on child sex allegations, and
guaranteed that ever more children continued to
suffer. And within its walls the Vatican shields an
American priest from allegations.
Still the Vatican turns a blind eye to this most
repugnant and damaging of all sexual practices, the
suffering little children whose priests come unto
them. Yet at the same time it thunders disapproval of
sex in every other more innocent circumstance,
blighting the lives of millions with its teaching on
gays, divorce, abortion and unrealistic self-denial.
There is no reckoning how many of the world's poorest
women have died giving birth to more children than
they can survive; contraception is women's true
saviour.
In 1971 I interviewed Mother Teresa and asked how she
justified letting starving babies be born to die on
Calcutta streets for lack of contraception. She said
sublimely that every baby entering the world was
another soul created in praise of God, even if it
lived only a few hours. She was never keen on cures:
suffering was a gift of God that enabled those who
cared for the afflicted to demonstrate their love. She
was beatified by John Paul II for their shared
religious mania. Those who met them talk of an aura of
love, power, listening and intensity. But goodness is
in doing good; good intent is no excuse for murderous
error.
Today's saccharine sanctimony will try to whiten the
sepulchre of yet another Pope whose obscurantist faith
has caused pointless suffering; it is no defence that
he was only obeying higher orders.
At the funeral will be a convocation of mullahs,
rabbis and all the other medieval faiths that
increasingly conspire together against modernity.
Islamic groups are sternly warning the Vatican to
stand firm against liberal influences on
homosexuality, abortion, contraception and the
ordination of women. What is it about religion that
unites them all on sex? It always expresses itself as
disgust for women's bodies, leading to a need to
suppress women altogether. Why is controlling women's
bodies the shared battle flag of every faith?
Disgracefully, the European rich quietly ignore the
church's outlandish teachings on contraception without
rebelling on behalf of the helpless third-world poor
who die for their misplaced faith. Those "civilised"
Catholics have as much blood on their hands as the
Vatican they support. They are like the Bollinger
Bolsheviks who defended the USSR and a murderous
ideology that they could do much to change. For today,
just remember what lies beneath all this magnificent
display.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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